Head of ethics office revealed as Obama donor

Director of the Office of Government Ethics Walter M. Shaub donated to President Obama before his appointment and defended Hillary Clinton’s decision to not disclose paid speeches to the Clinton Foundation while she was secretary of state.

Shaub, the head of the little-known ethics office, has been on the attack against President-elect Donald J. Trump for months.

Shaub has called Trump’s plan to sign over control of his business to his sons “meaningless,” and engaged in tweet storms from the official ethics Twitter account encouraging Trump to divest.
...
Shaub struck a different tone when testifying before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in December 2015, when he was asked about Secretary Clinton’s failure to disclose six-figure dollar speeches her husband gave to foreign governments and donors while they had interests before the State Department.

“The statute is a very long, very detailed statute,” he told Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R., Utah) when defending the speeches as allowed under ethics rules.

“Why don’t we pursue maximum disclosure of anything that could be potentially relevant or interesting to anyone? It’s simply because we’re a nation of laws and OGE is specifically regulated by an extremely detailed, highly prescriptive statute,” Shaub said. “Congress left us almost no discretion in terms of interpreting this statute. We apply it uniformly to everyone across the board.”

Shaub said it was satisfactory to not disclose the speeches—which totaled $26.4 million to the Clinton Foundation from corporations, foreign donations, and universities—because Bill Clinton was acting as an “agent” for a charity.

The speeches included $500,000 Bill Clinton received for remarks before a Kremlin-tied investment bank in Moscow in 2010, while the Russians were negotiating to acquire a uranium company full of Clinton Foundation donors. The Uranium One deal was signed off by Hillary Clinton’s State Department, giving Russia control of 20 percent of uranium production capacity in the United States.
...

He has sounded like a Democrat partisan all along and it is about time that someone did some reporting on his ethical judgments.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Hill:
Democrats are more fearful about what 2018 holds than Republicans, according to a poll released early Monday.

The new Axios survey showed 55 percent of Democrats are more hopeful personally about the new year while 44 percent are more fearful.

Among Republicans, 90 percent are more hopeful about 2018, and just 9 percent are more fearful.

When asked about the world in general, 29 percent of Democrats said they are more hopeful, compared to 70 percent who said they are more fearful.

Pollsters found 67 percent of Republicans are more hopeful about the world in general in the new year, and 32 percent are more fearful....
While this may just reflect Democrats' anxiety about being out of power, the poll also demonstrates a sense of optimism by Republicans. Except for a few of the never Trumpers, most Republicans have been pleasantly surprised by the accomplishments Trump has put in place in his first year in office. I think that is because Republicans are getting better at filte…

Some injuries were reported and more than a dozen people were arrested after opposing sides clashed at dueling pro- and anti-Trump rallies, Berkeley, Calif., police said.
The liberals engage in projection by calling Trump supporters fascists, when it is in fact, their supporters who are sparking the violence in Califonia. There is a strain of intolerance for other points of view that is enforced by people dressed in black and their faces covered. They physically attack Trump supporters or other conservatives. These people may wear black but the are the Brownshirts of liberal fascism.

Kurt Schlichter:
When we gather together this Christmas, it’s going to be super-awkward since everybody is dead because Donald Trump pulled out of the Paris Climate Scam, repealed net neutrality, and cut taxes. The depredations of Genghis Khan, the Black Plague, and the repeal of the Obamacare mandate – these are pretty much the same thing. Santa Claus and all of our dreams are dead too.

On the plus side, since we are all dead there’s no one to make egg nog, which is the worst of all possible nogs.
...
Santa stuffed coal into the Democrats’ fishnet stockings this year, as well as all sorts of other fossil fuels. The President turned on the Keystone pipeline, unleashed our miners, and told the environmentalist whiners to go frack themselves. Growing up near San Francisco, a town memorably described by (I believe) comedian Bobby Slayton as “The city that makes its own gravy,” I got used to goateed, over-tatted progressive doofuses who imagined that the electricity that powered their iPa…